New Worlds of Body, Mind & Spirit Since 1901
When I first began my Pagan journey, I was presented with the Wheel of the Year with which it seemed most Pagans worked. I learned all the dates and correspondences, which took me ages, and I often forgot what was supposed to be where! But I duly decorated my altar for each Sabbat and did the ritual, although I am not sure how much I actually connected with each one. As my journey has deepened and the years have passed, I realised that the Wheel of the Year isn't about dates on calendars; it's more about connections. Mother Nature does not keep to a schedule, and perhaps more so in recent years; the seasons seem to be all over the place. The energies will also change depending on where ...
I recently went to Sweden and spent some time thinking about (read: had a few random thoughts about) older Swedish folk magic and the types of such magic that are similar to the magic that I practice. (There is an abundance of folk magic that differs greatly from my practice, but that is material for a different article.) Plenty of Swedish folk magic was learned from Southern European Catholic monks who came to Sweden. Some formulations of magic that the monks brought are believed to have originated in the 10th or 11th century. The monks also "Christianized" existing Swedish incantations that were based on belief in the Norse gods, the Aesir and the Vanir. After the Reformation in Sweden ...
Most of us would naturally like the spaces that we inhabit and create to be inclusive of a broader range of humanity, especially marginalized people. I've met plenty of ritualists and event organizers that want to make their spaces more friendly and open to trans and nonbinary people (trans being a general term for people who aren't the gender that they were assigned at birth, and nonbinary specifically for those who are neither men nor women) but they don't know where to start. Far too often they assume that simply saying, "All are welcome" means that people of all sorts will feel welcome to attend. If you simply say that everyone is welcome without understanding what would make people ...
The paths that life take us are many and winding, with great and small adventures along the way. My own path to being a hedge witch is not dissimilar, and the roads that I have travelled have all informed me in my practice today. There are so many different elements and traditions of the Craft. So what was it that drew me to hedge witchcraft? Well, let's start at the beginning! As a child growing up on the edge of a village in the mountains of Quebec, I had always been drawn to and fascinated by the natural world, as well as the "mythical" inhabitants that shared our world or whose worlds overlapped our own. While belonging to the Protestant Church, all around me were tales from the ...
